Hello Everyone, I'm working on a new font preview widget / font selection dropdown for the text toolbar in Inkscape. My architecture is very pluggable so it's easy to swap in a preview renderer which uses a particular backend to render. So far I've written a preview renderer using pango-cairo and it works well, but I use threading to generate previews to avoid stalling the UI, and it turns out pango is not thread safe which makes it impossible to use my code in an app that uses Gtk+ as text is rendered with pango everywhere. Now I wanted to write a preview renderer using cairo's text API, and I have 2 questions: 1) Is cairo for all intents and purposes, and the text API in particular (i'm speaking of the "toy" API here as I don't need anything else, at least yet) thread safe? 2) How can I properly calculate the size of a surface needed to fit in a particular string of text, and how do I calculate the rendering position so that all actual text pixels will fit into the extents of the surface? I found a lot in the API docs and a few examples but I can't get it quite fully right. It would be nice if someone could give me a minor code example on how to do this, it would be very appreciated. A video of the current widget for those interested in this work on Inkscape can be found here: <a href="http://futurepast.free.fr/out.ogv">http://futurepast.free.fr/out.ogv</a>, and a wiki page detailing this work in cooperation with LinuxFund can be found here: <a href="http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/LinuxFund2009_1">http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/LinuxFund2009_1</a> Thanks in advance, M. -- Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months. [Bitte beachten Sie, dass dem Gesetz zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung zufolge jeder elektronische Kontakt mit mir sechs Monate lang gespeichert wird.]